Brasserie Zédel is the pinkest restaurant I have ever seen. It is pig pink, Barbie pink, icing-sugar pink and tongue pink. It is so pink that I photograph the napkin, and look at the napkin many times to remind myself that such a pink restaurant exists where it does, in a district reminiscent of cracked heads and bilious fear and tramps set alight: west Soho.
I love west Soho. East Soho upsets me, because you can buy posh whisky, smart cheese and a leather dog collar for £300, to prove you went to Soho, saw the tarts and the House of Karl Marx, and came back to Notting Hill without a spot on your conscience or, worse, stayed at the Soho Hotel, a corpse dressed in Cath Kidston chintz. Perhaps it is the horrors of Soho House and its attempt to build a country house for leftists above the Piccadilly Line, but I cannot bear it. West Soho, however, cannot shake off its misery, even with new paving stones on Sherwood Street glittering like pearls. Cross Wardour Street, wander down Brewer Street, and it stinks of pain that cannot be renovated. Its heart is ageless and broken. It is worse than Chinatown.
Zédel is under the Regent Palace Hotel, a sinister triangle which was Soho’s Grand Hotel. It was a foul and fascinating palace, opposite Dunkin’ Donuts, with windows uncleaned, it seemed, since Rudyard Kipling died. I can close my eyes and smell it still, that peculiar scent of pigeon cadaver, doughnut, urine and bleach. But that is all gone now; the hotel has been sandblasted into shininess and is more chilling than ever. And underneath, in the grandest public room the insane Edwardians could imagine, is Zédel, all smothered in a happy blanket of pink.
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